Sunday, March 17, 2013

I was talking this last week to some of my students about
Donne and terror, and this led me (via fear of God, plague, and prodigies) to
Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet about the meteorite which brought hypervelocity to
Berkshire in 1628, Look Up and Wonder.

The title page illustration (above) epitomizes the splendid
muddle of the whole work. “This is a strange Chronicle, written by a strong
hand … for God himselfe puts his owne Name to it”, says the pamphlet in its preliminaries
(what God wrote in the skies, Thomas Dekker now puts into print). And as it was
God who was sending a message to England at 5pm on Wednesday 9th April 1628,
the sky gets filled, as the woodcut shows, with beings and objects. The Winds
blow, a celestial army is ready for battle, and enormous cannon are placed up
in the sky to discharge the quite substantial space rocks which fell to ground
in Berkshire, and were dug up and collected.

Once the rocks are on the ground, Dekker can be quite
factual about them. Up in the air, their prodigious nature of the sound they
made was the thing of primary importance, and it was the terrific sound that
prompted all those visionary beings and objects.

Dekker doesn’t really seem to have a very large amount of
material about these dramatic events. Following the standard 17th century model
for spinning out thin material, he moralises bravely, until he adjudges his
reader to be in the right frame of mind (or maybe just impatient enough) to
hear the actual details of this celestial warning. Even so, the pages of
moralizing are not without their own interest.

Dekker certainly begins with great verve: “SO Benummed wee
are in our Sences, that albeit God himselfe Holla in our Eares, wee by our
wills are loath to heare him. His dreadfull Pursivants of Thunder,
and Lightning terrifie us so long as they have us in their fingers,
but beeing off, wee dance and sing in the midst of our Follies.”

I really liked God ‘hollering’. The cannon floating in the
air suggested by these cataclysmic bangs and divine hollers seem to prompt
Dekker to recollect a passage from the second book of Kings, where a
carpenter’s axe-head falls into a river, but Elijah miraculously makes it float
up to the surface again. That heavy artillery was floating up there in the sky
primarily because cannon were the definitive, the sole source for stupendously
loud bangs, so the sonic boom and the shock waves of the air-bursting bolide
simply had to be products of a magnified and heavenly cannonade.

Lurking as a background anxiety seem to be the continental
religious wars. Britain, Dekker reminds his readers, enjoys peace: “The Drum
beates here, but the Battailes are abroad: The Barbed Horse tramples not downe
our Corne-fieldes: The earth is not manurde with mans Bloud”.Very loud bangs in heaven apparently (though
this is not explicitly spelled-out) prompt the fear that such horrors may be
about to spread to England. It will happen, we gather, unless England ceases to
sin, sin being itself explosively dangerous: “our sinnes … daily lay traynes of
powder, to blow us up, and confound us”.

So Dekker describes what was at first an amazing sonic event
by assimilating it to the sounds of battle, and battle in turn justifies a sky
full of celestial beings methodically working through the sound effects of war:
“in an instant was heard, first a hideous rumbling in the Ayre, and
presently after followed a strange and fearful peale of Thunder, running up and
down these parts of the Countrey, but it strake with the loudest violence,
and more furious tearing of the Ayre, about a place called The White
Horse Hill, than in any other. The whole order of this thunder,
carried a kind of Majestical state with it, for it maintayned (to the
affrighted Beholders seeming) the fashion of a fought Battaile. It began
thus: First, for an on-set, went on one great Cannon as it were
of thunder alone, like a warning piece to the rest, that were to
follow. Then a little while after, was heard a second; and so by degrees a
third, until the number of 20. were discharged (or there abouts) in very good
order, though in very great terror. In some little distance of time after this,
was audibly heard the sound of a Drum beating a Retreat. Amongst all these
angry peals, shot off from Heaven; this begat a wonderful admiration, that at
the end of the report of every crack, or Cannon-thundering, a hizzing
Noyse made way through the Ayre, not unlike the flying
of Bullets from the mouths of great Ordnance: And by the judgement of
all the terror-stricken witnesses, they were Thunderbolts.”

The Wikipedia’s general entry on meteorites says
“Explosions, detonations, and rumblings are often heard during meteorite falls,
which can be caused by sonic booms as well as shock waves resulting from major
fragmentation events. These sounds can be heard over wide areas, up to many
thousands of square km. Whistling and hissing sounds are also sometimes heard,
but are poorly understood. Following passage of the fireball, it is not unusual
for a dust trail to linger in the atmosphere for some time.”

The debris-field for this air-bursting meteorite was
extensive (these fields are usually elliptical in shape, with the heaviest
portions of the space rock traveling furthest). Dekker centres his account, rather
enigmatically, on Hatford, which he describes as a town. But Hatford has always
been a tiny village, from the time of the Domesday book to the present. He
perhaps misunderstood the geographical prejudices of a local informant. Hatford
is very close to Stanford in the Vale, a far more obvious reference point. But
something must have happened there at Hatford. The Meteoritical Society’s
website very confidently places a Google pin just to the west of the village:

but I do not know on what basis they do that - i.e., whether
it means ‘this is where Hatford is’ or ‘a piece landed here’. Their figure for
the weight of the Hatford meteorite is 29 kilograms, and I don’t know how this
figure was arrived at either. Dekker indicates earth-impacts over a larger
area, and says one collected stone, broken on impact, weighed together 24
pounds (about 10 kilos).

For the largest earth-impacting fragment mentioned in the
pamphlet fell somewhere near Baulking. The two Letcombe villages (Dekker does
not specify which Letcombe he means) are about ten kilometers away from
Hatford: the pamphlet documents another fragment landing there, which was
impounded by the sheriff. That well-known landmark White Horse Hill gets
mentioned as a site of special terror (Dekker is cited from here in the OED as the
first recorded user of the idiom ‘terror-stricken’), and it’s about eight
kilometers west of the Letcombes. Dekker also mentions a ‘Sheffington’, and
that baffles me. This area suggested (amounting to some 80 square kilometers) includes
both a Shellingford and Uffington, so I wonder if they have coalesced on some
blotted or scribbled notes, or in muddled recollection of a verbal report. Especially
in the mysterious ‘Sheffington’, “all men …were so terrified, that they fell on
their knees, and not only thought, but sayd, that verily the day of
Judgement was come. Neyther did these fears take hold only of the people, but
even Beasts had the self-same feeling and apprehension of danger, running up
and down, and bellowing, as if they had been mad.” In the woodcut, the man
digging and the man on the ground are perhaps meant to be the same person, busy
working at one moment, overthrown by terror the next. If animals as phlegmatic
as cows thought the Day of Judgement has arrived, then these must indeed have
been terrifying phenomena.

Dekker seems to regard Berkshire as a long way away from his
London readers (“Nothing is here presented to thine eyes, to fright thee, but
to fill thee with Joy, that this Storm fell so far off, and not upon thine own
Head”). It’s a pity he wasn’t more thorough about where fragments landed, so
one could get a sense of a debris-field. The empty downlands to the south probably
had unobserved pieces fall. An air-bursting meteor can generate hundreds of
fragments. But it was a stony, ‘chondritic’ meteorite, so a search across
winter fields up near the Ridgeway with those convenient little magnets on
sticks unfortunately wouldn’t work.

The piece that landed in Baulking gets described very well,
with no fanciful accretions: “For one of them was seen by many people, to fall
at a place called Bawlkin Greene, being a mile and a half from Hatford: Which Thunder-bolt was
by one Mistress Greene, caused to be digged out of the ground, she
being an eye-witness amongst many other, of the manner of the falling. The form
of the Stone is three-square, and picked in the end: In colour
outwardly blackish, some-what like Iron: Crusted over with that blackness about
the thickness of a shilling. Within, it is soft, of a gray colour, mixed with
some kind of mineral, shining like small pieces of glass. This Stone brake
in the fall: The whole piece is in weight nineteen pound and a half: The
greater piece that fell off, weigheth five pound, which with other small pieces
being put together, make four and twenty pound and better.”

Twenty four pounds’ weight (plus) of material is impressive
(about 10 kilograms). It was identified as stone rather than metal, and has the
blacker fusion crust of a chondritic meteor. If it was shaped like a
three-sided pyramid (“three-square” is not a helpful phrase), ‘picked in the
end’ is perhaps a description of ‘regmaglypts’, the cavitations on the surface
of a meteor after it has burned its way through the atmosphere. They were
probably looking at something like this:

The shining bits of ‘mineral’ were probably the flakes of
iron and nickel typically seen in such a meteor. The threatening cannons of
heaven have fired, but there have been no casualties. Stones have fallen
harmlessly (though very alarmingly) to the ground. All England needs to do is
repent its sins, and God will not send the real scourge of real cannons
discharging real cannonballs.

Part of the burly charm of Dekker’s pamphlet is that it
manages to give a hearty endorsement to the supernatural explanation of this
messenger from the skies, and on the other hand to be dismissive of the more
imaginative responses of those who were there:

“Many do constantly affirm, that the shape of a Man,
beating of a Drum, was visibly seen in the Ayre, but this we leave to
proove. Others report that he, who digged up the Stone in Bawlkin
Greene, was at that instant stricken lame, but (God bee thanked) there
is no such matter. Report in such distractions as these, hath a thousand eyes,
and sees more than it can understand; and as many tongues, which being once set
a going, they speak any thing. So now a number of people report there were
three Suns seen in the Element; but on the contrary side, they
are opposers against them, that will affirm they beheld no such matter, and
that it was not so…”

I have cycled back and forth across this still lovely bit of
landscape on many occasions. The villages are still villages, and tend to have
well-built and beautiful churches. To the south, the Uffington White Horse,
Dragon Hill, and Wayland’s Smithy beside the Ridgeway give mystery to the
landscape. Not even Dekker can suggest why God would ever have wanted to shake
his fist (“with fear and trembling casting our eyes up to Heaven, let us now behold
him, bending his Fist only, as lately he did to the terror and affrightment of
all the Inhabitants, dwelling within a Towne in the County of Barkshire”)
at such a quiet region.

To the historical sources, this adds a passage that Nehemiah Wallington, some of whose extensive compilations survive up in Manchester at the John Rylands library, copied out from a contemporary letter that had been published. It adds either East or West Challow to the debris field.

Saturday, March 02, 2013

I’ve generally enjoyed the
novels of Jim Crace, and was pleased to see from Adam Mars-Jones’ review in the
LRB that another is out, with a setting both atopical and anachronistic. One
feature of his invented village is (the reviewer notes) that nobody there owns
a mirror, and this made for me a pleasing little connection to a late 17th
century work that had actually reminded me (while reading it) of Crace’s
fiction, Martin Martin’s account of his incident-filled visit to the Isle of St
Kilda in 1694. Among the things Martin says about those male St Kildans who get
to larger, more inshore islands, is that “they admired Glass Windows hugely,
and a Looking-Glass to them was a prodigy”.

The text has the title, A
Late Voyage to St Kilda, the Remotest of all
the HEBRIDES, OR Western Isles of SCOTLAND. WITH A History
of the Island, Natural, Moral, and Topographical.
Wherein is an Account of their Customs, Religion, Fish, Fowl,&c.As also a Relation of a late IMPOSTOR there, pretended to be Sent by St.John Baptist (1698). The author
of the Preface to the book (who tells us that Martin was himself from the Western
Isles, went to university in Edinburgh and had met members of the Royal Society),
makes an entirely persuasive point: “Men have Travelled far enough in the
search of Foreign Plants and Animals, and yet continue strangers to those
produced in their own natural Climate”.

St Kilda in the late 17th
century emerges as an utterly fascinating mix of things: a
Gaelic-Polynesian-Christian-Animist community of one hundred and eighty people,
18 horses, and 90 head of cattle, plus two thousand sheep dispersed over Hirta
and the even smaller local islands. It’s a community so traditional in its ways
as in places to recall the weird rituals of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast – yet so
marginal, that you feel that had they dared deviate in the slightest from
customs handed down over generations, that abandonment of the rigour necessary
to survival in this place might have doomed their entire way of life. Secured
by their extreme isolation from most of the perils threatened by other people,
they lived a life that tolerated an astonishing degree of natural risk. Their
voyages on their one open boat to the other islands and sea stacks around
Hirta, the main island, involved life-threatening dangers both in launching and
landing, then from currents and storms. For a main part of their diet, they harvested
eggs and birds, suspended over the sea cliffs on ropes made of twisted hemp
bound in leather. These daily hazards were not enough, it seems, for their
courtship customs, like those of Easter Island, required foolhardy demonstrations
of nerve and agility in climbs that modern free climbers could emulate easily
enough, though Martin is hugely impressed:

“In the face of the Rock,Southfrom the Town, is the famous Stone,
known by the Name of theMistress-Stone;it resembles a Door exactly, and is in
the very front of this Rock, which is Twenty or Thirty Fathom perpendicular in
Height, the Figure of it being discernable about the distance of a Mile: Upon
the Lintel of this Door, every Batchelor-Wooer is by an Antient Custom obliged
in honour to give a Specimen of his Affection for the Love of his Mistress”. The young man who had managed the climb then had to
strike a time-honoured (and ridiculously risky) posture high on the exposed
pinnacle. I found the following images (Martin may have confused the Mistress
stone and Lover’s stone into one story).

Though cool-headed modern
visitors seem able to emulate this feat, the St Kildans were clearly, and
necessarily, expert climbers. Boys would, Martin says, begin by climbing the
walls of their houses, this from the age of three. One stunt by which
especially proficient climbers could show off was making climbs with their back
to the rock face.

The community gets by with so
little. There’s the one boat, with seating and stowage on board assigned and
restricted with utterly exact specification of each man’s allocated space. The
whole community owns just three ropes for the egg and bird collecting. “The
Ropes belong to the Commonwealth, and are not to be used without the general
Consent of all”. There is “one Steel and
Tinder-Box in all this Commonwealth”, and the guardian of this precious
equipment makes a small toll in goods for providing his services.

Every St Kildan is an expert
reader of the sky, and as the stark requirement of your life probably depending
on reading it correctly (if a boat was to be launched), it was imperative to
update your reading experience all the time. But nobody is (literally speaking)
literate. They can tell the time to an exactitude by the tide, and continuous
awareness of the phase of the moon.

When Martin was there, some of
the older people could still remember wearing nothing else but sheepskin
garments. Plaids have arrived on boats from other outer islands less wildly
distant from the mainland, and the odd pair of trousers abandoned by sailors
caught by the natives filling knotted trouser-legs with their precious
birds’ eggs. Their plaids and mantles are pinned together with bones from
fulmars. The island women wear little espadrilles fashioned out of the necks of
gannets: “the only and ordinary Shoes they wear, are made of the Necks ofSolanGeese, which they cut above the Eyes,
the Crown of the Head serves for the Heel, the whole Skin being cut close at
the Breast, which end being sowed, the Foot enters into it, as into a piece of
narrow Stocking; this Shoe doth not Wear above Five Days.” There is no money in
circulation. Their rents to the laird, of the clan MacLeod, are paid in barley
grain, measured out in an immemorial grain measure which they will not change,
though its battered state makes it a regular point of dispute. In other acts of
trade they are implacable bargainers: “They are reputed very Cunning,
and there is scarce any Circumventing of them in Traffick and Bartering; the
Voice of one is the Voice of all the rest, they being all of a piece, their
common Interest uniting them firmly together.”

Occasionally alcohol is
brewed out of nettle roots, but mainly they drink water or whey – Martin
praises the superb water quality of some of the springs ( … but still).

These
people lived mainly on the sea birds that nested in abundance around them. The
map in this little book shows the many pyramids of loose stone that the St
Kildans built to store both eggs and dead birds: “They preserve theSolanGeese in their Pyramids for the space
of a Year, slitting them in the Back, for they have no Salt to keep them with. They
have Built above Five hundred Stone Pyramids for their Fowls, Eggs,&c. …scattering
the burnt Ashes of Turf under and about them, to defend them from the Air, driness
being their only Preservative”

Gannets, or ‘Solan geese’, were caught in profusion when they were nesting
on the island and adjacent sea-stacks. The birds were taken with horse-hair
nooses on long rods, or simply clubbed while trying to defend their young. From
the sea-stacks, bird corpses were thrown down from cliff-tops into the sea for
collection in the boat, until the islander in the boat declared the boat full
to capacity. Gannets were also killed by exploiting their methods of diving
onto prey:

“a Board set on purpose to
float above Water, upon it a Herring is fixed, which the Goose perceiving,
flies up to a competent height, until he finds himself making a strait line
above the Fish, and then bending his course perpendicularly piercing the Air,
as an Arrow from a Bow, hits the Board, into which he runs his Bill with all
his force irrecoverably, where he is unfortunately taken.

The gannets survived: St
Kildans still had the tragic Great Auk: “The Sea-Fowls are, first,Gairfowl,being the stateliest, as well as the
Largest of all the Fowls here, and above the Size of aSolanGoose, of a Black Colour, Red about
the Eyes, a large White Spot under each Eye, a long broad Bill; stands stately,
his whole Body erected, his Wings short, he Flyeth not at all, lays his Egg
upon the bare Rock, which, if taken away, he lays no more for that Year.” In
the crassly stupid human annihilation of this bird the St Kildans played a main
role. Flightless, the bird was unable to escape them, and the last great auk sighted
in the British Isles was collected by St Kildans, kept briefly in captivity,
then beaten to death for being a witch that had raised a storm.

The fulmar chick, which
protects itself by a projectile-vomit of its acidic stomach contents, was
(amazingly) exploited for those same nauseous ejecta: “the Inhabitants
and other Islanders put a great value upon it, and use it as aCatholiconfor Diseases, especially for any Aking
in the Bones, Stitches,&c.some in the adjacent Isles use it as a
Purge, others as a Vomiter; it is hot in quality, and forces its passage
through any Wooden Vessel.” Yes, one can imagine how emetic that was.

Martin allows himself some sentimental
reflections on the people as noble savages: “The Inhabitants of St.Kilda,are much, happier than the generality
of Mankind, as being almost the only People in the World who feel the sweetness
of true Liberty: What the Condition of the People in the Golden Age is feign’d
by the Poets to be, that theirs really is.” But who wouldn’t? He saw a resourceful
and brave people, who possess next to nothing, but require nothing from anyone
else.

They carried on their
immemorial way of life on an island whose small area is diminished by its precipitous
nature, and swept by storms. Somehow they also managed the struggle against a
small gene-pool, with very careful consideration given to who might marry whom
(They are “nice in examining the Degrees of Consanguinity before they Marry”,
Martin says). In terms of not out-consuming
their resources, they had the conception-limiting practice of continued
breast-feeding (“They give Suck to their Children for the space of Two
Years”), while Martin gives the impression, without saying very much about it, that
they had an abstinence-based (yet successful)
management of sexual desire.

These other - (or
out-of-worldly) - people were as vulnerable as a rare species (and they would
finally follow the great auks into extinction). Every time a boat arrives from
the mainland, a cough goes round the entire community, Martin learns, though has
to be persuaded that this is true. Two families are struggling with leprosy.

Their other susceptibility was
that they were, alongside that conservatism which seems a survival mechanism, all
mad for novelty, any kind of novelty. Martin is followed about and watched
intently, for at any time he might do or say something that they have never
conceived of before.

Martin had been able to get
to the island because word had reached the mainland of the previous arrival on
Hirta of an imposter, one Roderick, who had found in this place possibly the
only community anywhere who could have believed his preposterous lies. Sent to
the island (he told them) by John the Baptist, Roderick seems to have been bent
on some improvised experiment in social control, yet managed it extremely badly,
improvising his way into trouble. The Ten Commandments have been replaced (he
told them), and he offered the updates. Roderick seems to have made the women
of the island his target, and they may have been his motive for the whole
imposture. Accustomed to a life in which a woman has to be frugal with her body
as with everything else, these island women on the island were absolutely
faithful to their husbands (Martin says). They could not be corrupted by money (if
sailors managed to make a landing from a ship during some rare moment of dead
calm), as money meant nothing to them. But Roderick was achieving seductions.
Discovery of these actions ran neck-and-neck in discrediting him with his other
crazy innovations, which all failed, as they were bound to do in a place that
could only function and survive in the one traditional way it could function.

Because of the imposter
Roderick, Martin got his dangerous voyage out to the island (with narrow
escapes from drowning, being swept away into the main ocean, and being wrecked
at landfall) in the same boat as a minister, who has been sent out to put the
people back to rights. Even Roderick seems relieved, while the St Kildans are
happy to be back to what they were.

Martin described this
remarkable island with the Royal Society in mind. He does not waste words on
its wild beauty. There’s a good map and some good photographs at the following
URL’s: